Modern Internet search engines, such as the one provided by Yahoo! Inc., are capable of receiving query terms from remote users and searching a corpus of images—containing images which were automatically discovered from all over the Internet—for images that are relevant to those query terms. After finding one or more images that are relevant to the query terms submitted by a remote user, such an Internet search engine typically generates a search results page that contains thumbnails of the images that were determined to be most relevant to the query. The search results page also contains user-selectable hypertext links to other web pages that contain the full-size versions of the thumbnail images. Within the search results page, the thumbnail images may be placed in ranked order, with the images that were deemed to be most relevant to the query being placed closer to the top of the search results page than are the images that were deemed to be not as relevant to the query. The Internet search engine sends the search results page over the Internet to the remote user's Internet browser application (e.g., Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera Software Opera, Apple Safari, etc.), which displays the search results page to the user.
Sometimes, the query terms that an Internet search engine receives from a remote user have multiple different meanings. Under such circumstances, the search results page may contain thumbnail images that relate to each of the different meanings. For example, if a user submits a query that contains the term “jaguar,” then the search results page might contain some thumbnail images that show the jaguar species of animal, some thumbnail images that show Jaguar automobiles, and some thumbnail images that relate to a computer operating system called Jaguar. In actuality, the user might only be looking for thumbnail images that pertain to the first meaning-the species of animal. Unfortunately for the user, these thumbnail images are likely to be scattered in a purely chaotic manner among the other thumbnail images that pertain to the other meanings in which the user is not interested. This scattering of image results that pertain to a common meaning of a query term causes the user to expend additional time and energy sorting through the image results to locate the results in which the user is actually interested.
Other times, a user might actually not have in mind any specific meaning of the query terms that he submits to the Internet search engine; the user might be interested in seeing images that pertain to all of the different meanings of the submitted query terms. Under some circumstances, the relevance-ranked thumbnail images contained within the search results page will pertain dominantly, or even exclusively, to one particular meaning of the query terms. Although thumbnail images that pertain to other meanings of the search results might also be at least somewhat relevant, these thumbnail images might be underrepresented, or entirely left off of, at least the initial search results page because these thumbnail images were not deemed to be as relevant to the query terms as were the thumbnail images that pertain to the dominant meaning.
Even in situations where the user had a specific meaning in mind when he submitted the query terms, the most relevant image search results might come from different pages that all contain the same, or extremely similar, versions of an image. In these situations, the image search results page might appear to repeat the same thumbnail image over and over again. Typically, when a user is searching for images, the user will not be interested in the fact that the same image is present on many different web pages; the user would prefer to see different images represented within the image search results page. Users like to have options, but if an image search results page contains only a small selection of images, with each image repeated multiple times, then a user will naturally conclude that his options are limited (when, in actuality, his options might not be as limited as he thinks). The user is not likely to be satisfied when the image search results page lacks diversity.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.